Le 07-juin-07, à 15:47, Torgny Tholerus a écrit :By "knowing" I mean the same thing as when you say that a computer "knows" what are the countries in Europa if you ask the computer: "What are the countries in Europa?", and the computer answers: "Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, ...". I mean nothing more with the term "know" than just this, you have some data stored, and you can use this data in some way. "Knowing" <===> "Using knowledge".
When I look at you (in 3rd person view), I see that you are constructed in exactly the same way as I am. So I know why you say that you are conscious. I know nothing sure about you, but the most probable conclusion is that you are equally unconscious as I am.Actually I do think like Quentin. I don't think you can *know* anything if you are not conscious. Knowing is a sort of truth awareness, albeit incommunicable as such.
You can look at me as a computer that behave as if it has consciousness. And I am referring to other persons behaving like me...What is the philosophical term for persons like me, that totally deny the existence of the consciousness?An eliminativist.
(But I don't understand what you mean by "persons like me", which is a first person notion in need of some implicit notion of consciousness).
In some country, until rather recently, some doctor did operate babies without anesthesia, because they did believe that baby are not conscious. Now, they have changed their mind, and babies are treated by surgeon with anesthesia. Does this controverse makes sense for someone who deny totally the existence of consciousness?The important thing in this situation is if the pain center in the brain is stimulated or not. When you operate babies (or animals) without anesthesia, then surely the pain center is stimulated, so that is definitely wrong.
I deny the "actual infinte". It is impossible to construct an infinite set, a set where you have a mapping from every element to a true subset.(I also deny the existence of infinity...)If you deny only what is called in the literature the "actual infinite", that is the idea of a close and well defined infinite entity or set, then you could be an intuitionist, or a finitist, or a computationalist. What I call "comp", or digital mechanism, is called "finitism" by Judson Webb (ref in my thesis or any of my papers).
If you deny the potential infinite as well, (that is the idea that some set can be generated forever although not in any actual form, like when se say: {1, 2, 3 *ETC*}, then you belong to the few who are "ultrafinitist". I don't believe that the very notion of ultrafinitism could be defined in any ultrafinitist way, unless you are materialist and physicalist, meaning that when you say that you don't believe in infinity, you really are only saying that you don't believe in *primary physical* infinities. Note that by UDA, comp or finitism entails there are no physical primary entities at all, neither finite nor infinite.I accept a sort of "unlimitness". If you have a set of numbers, you can always increase that set by adding 1 to the biggest number in the set, and then add this new number to the set. And you can do this as many times as you want. But the new, increased, set will always be finite, independant of how many times you add new numbers to the set, you will never reach an infinite set.
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